Anybody who has hung around the free software community for a while
will be familiar with the confusion created by the ambiguity between
"free as in price" versus "free as freedom." In the essay I argue
that there is a less appreciated semantic ambiguity that arises when
we begin to think that what matters is that software is
free. Software doesn't need freedom, of course; Users of software
need freedom. My essay looks at how the focus on free software, as
opposed to on free users, has created challenges and divisions
in the free software movement.

My essay is short and has two parts: The first is basically a short
introduction to free software movement. The second lays out what I see
as major challenges for free software. I will point out that these are
some of the areas that I am working most closely with the FSF — who
are having their annual fundraiser at the moment — to support and
build advocacy programs around.

Does collaboration result in higher quality creative works than individuals working alone? Is working in groups better for functional works like code than for creative works like art? Although these questions lie at the heart of conversations about collaborative production on the Internet and peer production, it can be hard to find research settings where you can compare across both individual and group work and across both code and art. We set out to tackle these questions in the context of a very large remixing community.

Example of a remix in the Scratch online community, and the project it is based off. The orange arrows indicate pieces which were present in the original and reused in the remix.

Remixing platforms provide an ideal setting to answer these questions. Most support the sharing, and collaborative rating, of both individually and collaboratively authored creative works. They also frequently combine code with artistic media like sound and graphics.

We know that that increased collaboration often leads to higher quality products. For example, studies of Wikipedia have suggested that vandalism is detected and removed within minutes, and that high quality articles in Wikipedia, byseveralmeasures, tend to be produced by more collaboration. That said, we also know that collaborative work is not always better — for example, that brainstorming results in less good ideas when done in groups. We attempt to answer this broad question, asked many times before, in the context of remixing: Which is the better description, “the wisdom of crowds” or “too many cooks spoil the broth”? That, fundamentally, forms our paper’s first research question: Are remixes, on average, higher quality than single-authored works?

A number of critics of peer production, and some fans, have suggested that mass collaboration on the Internet might work much better for certain kinds of works. The argument is that free software and Wikipedia can be built by a crowd because they are functional. But more creative works — like music, a novel, or a drawing — might benefit less, or even be hurt by, participation by a crowd. Our second research question tries to get at this possibility: Are code-intensive remixes, higher quality than media-intensive remixes?

We try to answers to these questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch – a large online remixing community where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment: a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million, mostly young, users.

Measuring quality is tricky and we acknowledge that there are many ways to do it. In the paper, we rely most heavily a measure of peer ratings in Scratch called loveits — very similar to “likes” on Facebook. We find similar results with several other metrics and we control for the number of views a project receives.

In answering our first research question, we find that remixes are, on average, rated as being of lower quality than works of single authorship. This finding was surprising to us but holds up across a number of alternative tests and robustness checks.

In answering our second question, we find rough support for the common wisdom that remixing tends to be more effective for functional works than for artistic media. The more code-intensive a project is, on average, the closer the gap is between a remix and a work of single authorship. But the more media-intensive a project is, the bigger the gap. You can see the relationships that our model predicts in the graph below.

Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects showing the predicted number of loveits using our estimates. In the left panel, the x-axis varies number of blocks while holding media intensity at the sample median. The right panel varies the number of media elements while holding the number of blocks at the sample median. Ranges for each are from 0 to the 90th percentile.

Both of us are supporters and advocates of remixing. As a result, we were initially a little troubled by our result in this paper. We think the finding suggests an important limit to the broadest claims of the benefit of collaboration in remixing and peer production.

That said, we also reject the blind repetition of the mantra that collaboration is always better — for every definition of “better,” and for every type of work. We think it’s crucial to learn and understand the limitations and challenges associated with remixing and we’re optimistic that this work can influence the design of social media and collaboration systems to help remixing and peer production thrive.

This week, I accepted a job on the faculty of at the University of
WashingtonDepartment of Communication. I've arranged for a
post-doc during the 2013-2014 academic year which I will spend at UW
as an Acting Assistant Professor. I'll start the tenure-track
Assistant Professor position in September 2014. The hire is part of a
"big data" push across UW. I will be setting up a lab and research
projects, as well as easing into a teaching program, over the next
couple years.

I'm not going to try to list all the great people in the department,
but UW Communication has an incredible faculty with a strong
background in studying the effect of communication technology on
society, looking at political communication, enagement, and collective
action, and tracing out the implications of new communication
technologies — in addition to very strong work in other areas. Years
ago, I nearly joined the department as a graduate student. I am
unbelievably happy that their faculty has invited me to join as a
colleague.

Outside of my new department, the University of Washington has a
superb group of folks working across the school on issues of
quantitative and computational social science, human-computer
interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. They are
hiring a whole bunch of folks, across the university, who specialize
in data-driven social science. I already have a bunch of relationships
with UW faculty and students and am looking forward to expanding and
deepening those.

On a personal level, Mika and I are also very excited to return to
Seattle. I grew up in the city and I've missed it, deeply, since I
left — now nearly half my lifetime ago! It will be wonderful to be
much closer to many of my family members.

But I know that I will miss the community of friends and colleagues
that I've built in Boston over the last 7+ years just as deeply. I'm
going to miss the intellectual resources, and the intellectual
community, that folks in Cambridge get to take for granted. That said,
I plan to maintain affiliations and collaborations with folks at
Harvard and MIT and will have resources that let me spend time in
Boston doing that.

The academic job market is challenging and confusing. But it's given
me a lot of opportunity to reflect, at length, on both the substance
of my research and the academy and its structures and processes. I've
got a list of blog topics queued up based on that thinking. I'll be
posting them here on my blog over the next few months.

Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with
cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to
become a football fan.

Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michael Albert at MIT where
he chastised American intellectuals for what he claimed was cultivated
disdain of professional sports. Albert suggested that sports reflect
the go-to topic for small talk and building rapport across class and
context. But he suggested that almost everybody who used the term
"working class struggle" was incapable of making small talk with
members of the working class because — unlike most working class
people (and most people in general) — educated people systematically
cultivate ignorance in sports.

Professional sports are deeply popular. In the US, Sunday Night
Football is now the most popular television show among women in
its time slot and the third most popular television in America among
18-49 year old women. That it is also the most popular television
show in general is old news. There are very few things that
anywhere near half of Americans have in common. Interest in football
is one of them. An enormous proportion of the US population watches
the Superbowl each year.

I recognized myself in Albert's critique. So I decided to follow a
local team. I picked football because it is the most popular sport in
America and because their strong revenue sharing system means that
either team has a chance to win any given match. My local team is the
New England Patriots and I've watched many of the team's games or
highlights over the last season and a half. I've also followed a
couple football blogs.

A year and half in, I can call myself a football fan. And I've learned
a few things in the process:

With a little effort, getting into sports is easy. Although
learning the rules of a sport can be complicated, sports are
popular because people, in general, find them fun to watch. If you
watch a few games with someone who can explain the rules, and if
you begin to cheer for a team, you will find yourself getting
emotionally invested and excited.

Sports really do, as Albert implied, allow one to build rapport and
small talk across society. I used to dread the local cab
driver who would try to make small talk by mentioning Tom Brady
or the Red Sox. No more! Some of these conversations turn into
broader conversations about life and politics.

Interest in sports can expand or shrink to fill the time you're
willing to give it. It can mean just glancing through the sports
sections of the paper and watching some highlights here or
there. Or it can turn into a lifestyle.

It's not all great. Football, like most professional sports, is
deeply permeated with advertisements, commercialism, and
money. Like other sports, it is also violent. I don't think I could
ever get behind a fight sport where the goal is to hurt someone
else. The machoness and absence of women in the highest levels of
most professional sports bothers me deeply.

I've also tried to think a lot about why I, like most of my friends,
avoided sports in the past. Disinterest in sports among academics and
the highly educated is, in my experience, far from passive. I've heard
people almost compete to explain the depth of their ignorance in
sports — one doesn't even know the rules, one doesn't own a
television, one doesn't know the first thing about the game. I did
the same thing myself.

Bethany Bryson, a sociologist at JMU has shown that increased
education is associated with increased inclusiveness in musical taste
(i.e., highly educated people like more types of music) but that these
people are most likely to reject music that is highly favored by the
least educated people. Her paper's title sums up the attitude:
"Anything But Heavy Metal". For highly educated folks, it's a sign
of cultivation to be eclectic in one's tastes. But to signal to others
that you belong in the intellectual elite, it can pay in cultural
capital to dislike things, like sports, that are enormously popular
among the least educated parts of society.

This ignorance among highly educated people limits our ability to
communicate, bond, and build relationships across different segments
of society. It limits our ability to engage in conversations and build
a common culture that crosses our highly stratified and segmented
societies. Sports are not politically or culturally unproblematic. But
they provide an easy — and enjoyable — way to build common ground with
our neighbors and fellow citizens that transcend social boundaries.

Last weekend, my friend Andrés Monroy-Hernández pointed out
something that I've been noticing as well. Although the last decade
has seen a huge decrease in the time of it takes to boot, the same can
not be said for the increasing powerful computer in my pocket that
is my phone.

As the graph indicates, I think my cross-over was around 2010 when
I acquired an SSD for my laptop.

A couple days ago, I woke up to this exciting series of text messages
from a unfamiliar phone number.

Because I've not received a reply in the last couple days, because it
was a Seattle phone number but I haven't lived in Seattle for years,
and because I don't know of anyone in Seattle who was about to give
birth, I'm pretty confident that this was indeed a case of misdirected
text messages!

But whoever you are: Congratulations! I know it was a mistake, but
that really made my day!

In late July, the Awesome Foundations invited me to participate in
an interesting conversation about open brands at their
conference. Awesome is a young collection of organizations
struggling with the idea of if, and how, they want to try to control
who gets call themselves Awesome. I was asked to talk about how the
free software community approaches the issue.

Through that process, I've come up with three principles which I think
lead to more clear discussion about whether a free culture or free
software should register a trademark and, if they do, how they should
think about licensing it. I've listed those principles below in order
of importance.

1. We want people to use our brands. Conversation about trademarks
seem to turn into an exercise in imagining all the horrible ways in
which a brand might be misused. This is silly and wrong. It is worth
being extremely clear on this point: Our problem is not that people
will misuse our brands. Our problem is that not enough people will use
them at all. The most important goal of a trademark policy
should be to make legitimate use possible and easy.

We want people to make t-shirts with our logos. We want people to
write books about our products. We want people to create user groups
and hold conferences. We want people to use, talk about, and promote
our projects both commercially and non-commercially.

Trademarks will limit the diffusion of our brand and, in that way,
will hurt our projects. Sometimes, after carefully considering these
drawbacks, we think the trade-off is worth making. And sometimes it
is. However, projects are generally overly risk averse and, as a
result, almost always err on the side of too much control. I am
confident that free software and free culture projects' desire to
control their brands has done more damage than all brand misuse put
together.

2. We want our projects to be able to evolve. The creation of a
trademark puts legal power to control a brand in the hands of an
individual, firm, or a non-profit. Although it might not seem like
such a big deal, this power is, fundamentally, the ability to
determine what a project is and is not. By doing this, it creates a
single point of failure and a new position of authority and, in that
process, limits projects' ability to shift and grow organically over
time.

I've heard that in US politics, there is no trademark for the terms
Republican or Democrat and that you do not need permission to
create an organization that claims to be part of either party. And
that does not mean that everybody is confused. Through social and
organizational structures, it is clear who is in, who is out, and who
is on the fringes.

More importantly, this structure allows for new branches and groups
outside of the orthodoxy to grow and develop on the margins. Both
parties have been around since the nineteenth century, have swapped
places on the political spectrum on a large number of issues, and have
played host to major internal ideological disagreements. Almost any
organization should aspire to such longevity, internal debate, and
flexibility.

3. We should not confuse our communities. Although they are often
abused, trademarks are fundamentally pro-consumer. The point of
legally protected brands is to help consumers from being
confused as the source of a product or service. Users might
love software from the Debian project, or might hate it, but it's nice
for them to be able to know that they're getting "Debian Quality" when
they download a distribution.

And since lawyers are rarely involved, it is hardly clear that a
registered trademark would help in the vast majority of these these
situations. It is also the case that most free software/culture
organizations lack the money, lawyers, or time, to enforce trademarks
in any case. Keeping your communities of users and developers clear on
what is, and what isn't, your product and your project is deeply
important. But how we choose to do this is something we should
never take for granted.